Goodyear officials have a rain tire that can be used on road courses in the NASCAR Nationwide Series.
Jeff Gordon remembers the NASCAR Sprint Cup practice on rain tires in 2000 at Watkins Glen.
“I went down into Turn 1 and my windshield wiper went off into the kitty litter down there,” Gordon said Friday.
With that memory, Jeff Gordon wasn’t begging NASCAR to put rain tires on Sprint Cup cars in order to get the Sunday road-course race run at Watkins Glen International. NASCAR postponed the Cup race to Monday, the second consecutive week the Cup event was postponed because of rain.
NASCAR had rain tires available for the Nationwide race Saturday at Watkins Glen – it ran part of the road-course race at Montreal last season in the rain – but has opted not to use them at the Sprint Cup level.
The race at Montreal eventually had to be stopped because of visibility.
“For the level of competition that we have in the Sprint Cup Series and as the stakes continue to rise from a competition standpoint, a sponsorship standpoint, a championship standpoint, we’d be best served to run the Sprint Cup Series on dry race tracks,” NASCAR spokesman Kerry Tharp said Sunday after the rainout was announced.
“We feel like that would be better for competition, that would better for the level of racing that the fans are accustomed to seeing.”
During the Nationwide race a day prior to the Cup race, teams had one set of rain tires mounted because of the threat of rain.
“I think that in bad weather NASA sends up smaller space craft instead of the big space craft and it is pretty similar,” driver Ryan Newman said. “You don’t want to risk a lot. I don’t think it would be an ideal situation for all the fans. … I have never raced in the rain. It would be a disadvantage to me.
“I think it is still racing. As far as the fans, I don’t think it would be as good of a race in the rain as it would be if it is dry. That I think is the hesitation more so for Sunday than it is on Saturday.”
Gordon said he watched the race in Montreal and figured if a driver such as Carl Edwards had to clean off his windshield with a hand-held wiper he kept inside his car, that racing in the rain was definitely less than ideal.
“We have enough challenges trying to stay on the track when it’s dry and I can’t imagine what it would be like in a Cup race if it was wet,” Gordon said. “I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed watching it rain up there in Montreal … That was highly entertaining, but I was very glad that I wasn’t inside the car.
“One of the biggest reasons, I think it would be fun to actually drive the cars in the rain if you get a consistent rain and you can feel the grip level, but as you saw, the windshield wipers don’t work, the de-fog doesn’t work.”
Another issue why the Nationwide Series uses rain tires is because with a rain date Monday at Watkins Glen was not cost-effective for the teams.
“There’s a little more flexibility to rescheduling a Sprint Cup Series race as opposed to a Nationwide race,” Tharp said.
Crew Chief Club on NASCAR LIVE 